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Where's the moderation on this forum? Yes, I know, you could moderate me. But @EricoF3 seems to be quite slow and is quite rude and insulting. Sure, we have digs at one another, but mostly are in good fun. But this is overboard. I know the blog has jumped the shark, does it mean it's a sewer?

@robertsjoe: what it prove that you have mantal retardation it is your habit to come on a Windows blog and always post stupid Mac Fan Boys silly comment...
You know I am not the one who call you "robertsgay" first!!!

MikeGalos,
In your usual hypocritical tone...care to explain the whole "Vista Capable" debacle?
Didn't you just say, "...but when products that Apple currently sells can't run their own current OS without turning off key system features that's just sad."
What about that whole, "My machine won't run Aero, a key system feature, but the machine said it was Vista Capable...or was that Vista Ready?"
Wow man....ever hear the saying, "Those in glass houses shouldn't throw stones"?
You are such a hypocrite.

Wow Paul is really running scared here. His call to action is a little pointless, though. The geek blog community doesn't enforce the antitrust law. The DOJ and the courts do that. And assurance by Paul Thurrott that Apple will "real soon now" have a monopoly in some market isn't quite enough, sorry.
Macs - at most 10 percent of the US market (and global is smaller as Paul always reminds us).
iPhones - 13.7 percent of global smartphone market. Blackberry and Nokia are still the leaders in their respective main markets (US and europe, respectively).
Music - there's no such thing as the "digital music market." There's the market for recorded music, whether on CD, downloads or whatever. Downloads are still a minority of the market (25% I think).
TV and Movies - even as to digital delivery, there's pay cable, pay-per-view, etc. Plus the huge market for DVDs which clearly outsells Apple.
DOJ and the courts aren't going to conclude that Apple has to change ANYTHING based on speculation that it "most definitely" will have a monopoly in any of these markets some time in the future, combined with some unknown set of anticompetitive conduct at that unknown point in the future with an unknown set of facts and unknown competitive landscape.
You see, when it comes to finding a company in violation of the law (for example the antitrust law), you have to wait until -- oops -- the company has actually violated the law. You can't "nip in the bud" a speculative prediction of a future violation.
Sorry Paul.

@mikegalos
"If it was ALL desktop PC operating systems then Microsoft has a smaller market and the question of whether they had a monopoly was more debatable."
Honest question (You do seem to know your tech history!)
Was it really 'debatable'? What was Microsoft's share of ALL descktops back then?

SPiotr
I don't recall the numbers but remember that at the time Windows was still competing with IBM's OS/2 Warp, NeXT's NeXTSTEP, Be's BeOS, Apple's Mac OS as well as Linux and BSD. Additionally, Apple and IBM were still still trying to take over the market with their jointly developed AIM Alliance Taligent OS (and Apple's Copland, Gershwin and Pink had just failed and IBM still had Workplace OS under development as a fallback)
It was certainly nowhere near as boring an operating system market as we have now with Windows being the only alternative to 1960s Unix clones and add-ons.

rr0de
You mean referring to Snow Leopard as just a "tune-up"?
Or that despite all Apple's claims of signifcantly improved performance especially in high load conditions CNet found that "[t]hough the system performs well in everyday use, many of our tests indicate it is slightly slower than the older version of Leopard in more intensive application processes"?
Or is it that despite even the newest Apple ads starting this week touting how Macs don't get viruses Apple has felt it necessary to bundle their new anti-virus/anti-spyware product on all copies?

@mikegalos
I think I found the answer:
http://www.gartner.com/5_about/press_room/pr19990129a.html
36 million PCs sold in 1998
Apple sold 2.7 million worldwide so ... possibly around 4% of the US market.
That seems to still leave Microsoft with over 90% of the desktop OS market. (or have I missed something?)
Do you still insist that there was any doubt about Microsoft's massive market power?

I have been following this all day, and this is just crazy! Windows 7 is brand new OS with a lot of parts taken from vista and fixed(to be faster,leaner,over all better and to just re brand the name), mac OSX is more of a fix things up type of upgrade. They fix minor details which i dont believe you can say about windows 7. I mean did anyone on the mac side think "hey i wonder why this is only 30 dollars instead of my normal 129"
of course not and Engadget said it best "appearances and expectations matter, and there's simply not enough glitz on this kitty to warrant the usual $129"
link
http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/26/snow-leopard-review/#continued

@inhaledalarm you would have to be a total and I mean total idiot to not see that 7 is 95% or more Vista. 98% of of the UI is exactly the same. It uses the same exact driver model. Its kernel version 6.1 vs 6.0 for Vista. Brand new OS lol.
@Mike of course you pull out all of the negative points, but I think those are valid along with the positive. CNET at least was technically accurate. Paul had little to no accuracy. CNET's tone was informative and not Snarky. My 8 year old daughter could have done a better hack job than Paul's review.
I think they are both minor updates. I think that 7 is mostly surface and a small under the hood tweaks to what is Vista SP2 with all updates. I think SL is very minor surface updates but major changes under the hood, 64bit when possible, all PPC code ripped out, Open CL, Grand Central.
Both should be $29, only one is.

From inhaledalarm's link...
"The biggest compatibility-breaker is the demise of InputManager plugins in 64-bit apps, which means things like Unsanity's Application Enhancer framework"
This is the same app that bit many Tiger users that upgraded to Leopard over the top. Hopefully they wont make that mistake twice.

@rr0de yes i know 95% is vista, but are you saying that they did not have alot of fixing to do with that 5% the point of vista was to be secure(unlike xp turned out to be). However they had to change the code dramatically to make it run smoother and faster. Also they just did a overhall of the driver software in vista(note all the people pissed off there stuff didnt work). so to change it would be crazy. Apple is clearly making the push to 64 bit OS for no reason(yes i saw points above) so now mac people(i think) will know what it is like to have stuff no work with it.

@mikegalos
Mike I agree. If Apple were ever to come up against the DOJ for the anti-trust violations that you are so certain they have committed... an awful lot of time would be taken up with defining the relevant markets.
Unfortunately there is a rather large flaw in the way that you have attempted to define these markets.
"If you define the market as just cell phones then Apple clearly does NOT have a monopoly (and they're not even a major player)."
Agreed. Even if the market was defined as just "smart phones" I don't think iPhone would have sufficient market power. (yet!)
"If you define the iPhone as an iPod Touch with an added feature then it clearly IS part of the iPod monopoly on portable media players."
That's the problem! What you are basically saying here, is that the iPhone is basically just a cell phone and a PMP combined. If that were the case then you would have to include ALL cell phones that were ALSO portable media players. My (very rough) guess at the size of that market in the US.... getting close to 200 million a year. How many of those are Apple products?
If people are going to accuse Apple of anti-trust violations because they are preventing the Palm Pre from accessing iTunes then you WOULD have to include both the phone and PMP markets.
"In the case of portable music players there's no question that Apple is the monopoly in that market."
Yep. But we have just agreed that(most) cell phones are just PMPs with an additional feature, so it appears that Apple's iPods don't have a monopoly in THAT market either. That really should be no surprise to anyone here. Steve Jobs must have lied to us about the market share figures.
However, all is not lost. I am sure that collectively we can come up with a specific market that will prove beyond doubt that iPods and iPhones suffer from no viable competition.

Boy, I just read his OS X 10.6 review and contains some basic proof-reading errors:
"It's just that when compared ..." --> missing comma after "that" for the non-restrictive clause
"Snow Leopard offers a simpler taken (sic) ..."
"which like Windows Media Player in Windows 7, " --> should have a comma after "which"
"is the most substantial offering ..." should be "is the MORE substantial offering" --> more and better when rating two items; most and best when rating more than two

Spiotr
Actually you're missing a couple of things:
1) The period of the investigation for the DOJ trial was mostly about the earlier period leading up to the release of Windows 95 and shortly after.
2) There were a LOT more choices in the OS market at the time than just Windows and Mac OS. Remember that, at the time, the number two GUI was not the Mac but IBM's OS/2 Warp and that GUIs were NOT universal yet with a large percentage of the installed base still on MS-DOS and various MS-DOS clones.

Spiotr
Or, to put it more simply, the trial mainly covered events that happened during the "OS Wars" when there was massive competition for what would become the next big operating system and when Microsoft's status in the operating system market was hardly that dominent or secure.
BUT, by the time the trial actually happened, the OS Wars were over, Microsoft had one and at that point could be judged to have monopoly power over personal computer operating systems.
In effect, one of the many flaws in the trial was that it was hearing complaints not about how a monopoly had abused that power but how a non-monopoly competitor had won a massive competition and in the process gained monopoly power.
One of the big complaints, for example, was that IBM claimed that Microsoft had refused them a license to Windows 95. IBM claimed (with no evidence, by the way) that Microsoft's refusal was as revenge for the success in the market of IBM's OS/2 family. Microsoft claimed (with excellent documentation that was NOT refuted by IBM) that they refused to give IBM a new license because IBM was over a year behind on paying for their existing license and that when Microsoft audited IBM they found that IBM had vastly underreported the number of copies of Windows 3.x that they had sold and were obligated to pay for. Microsoft had offered to give IBM the license for Windows 95 once IBM had set up a plan to pay their existing bill.

Remembrance of Things Past
So for a more reasoned perspective, let us take a breath and remember what the world was like before Apple introduced the iPhone:
Carriers ruled the industry with an iron fist
To access carriers’ networks handset makers capitulated everything
Carriers dictated phone designs, features, apps, prices, marketing, advertising and branding
Phones were reduced to cheap, disposable lures for carriers’ service contracts
There was no revenue sharing between carriers and manufacturers
There was no notion of phone networks becoming dumb pipes anytime soon
Affordable, unlimited data plans as standard were unheard of
A phone that would entice people to switch networks by the millions was a pipe dream
Mobile devices were phones first and last, not usable handheld computers
Even the smartest phones didn’t have seamless WiFi integration
Without Visual Voice Mail, messages couldn’t be managed non-linearly
There were no manufacturer owned and operated on-the-phone application stores as the sole source
An on-the-phone store having 65,000 apps downloaded nearly 2 billion times was not on anyone’s radar screen
Low-cost, high-volume app pricing strategy with a 70/30 split didn’t exist
Robust one-click in-app transactions were unknown
There was no efficient, large scale, consistent and lucrative mobile app market for developers large and small
Buttons, keys, joysticks, sliders…anything but the screen was the focus of phones
Phones didn’t come with huge 3.5″ touch screens
Pervasive multitouch, gesture-based UI was science fiction
Actually usable, multi-language, multitouch virtual keyboards on phones didn’t exist
Integrated sensors like accelerometers and proximity detectors had no place in phones
Phones could never compete in 3D/gaming with dedicated portable consoles
iPod-class audio/video players on mobiles didn’t exist
No phone had ever offered a desktop-like web browser experience
Sophisticated SDKs and phones were strangers to each other
This list too could go on. But it’s sobering to remember that a single device by a company with zero experience in the industry and against all odds caused such a tidal wave of change. Change didn’t come because of Nokia, Microsoft, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, RIM or any other player in the market for the past 15 years bet their company on it. Android and webOS weren’t there before the iPhone. But it’s convenient to forget all this when the meme demands Apple to be smeared with the evil brush.
http://counternotions.com/2009/08/26/pre-iphone/

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